Nazi goofs

I admittedly haven't read a lot about the Nazis, but this is the first thing I've read that has shown just how bumbling and juvenile and egotistical they were. I mean, you see Hitler in film footage carrying on like a buffoon, but everyone around him seems so smitten and serious (when in fact he is so laughable ... his contemporaries could have laughed him off the stage, but we can't laugh at his laughability because we know how the story ends). The focus always seems to be on the sinister, on this united wall of Aryan determination. In Larson's book, you see the Nazis as petty, in-fighting, not terribly bright individuals plagued with paranoia and various delusions of personal grandeur. That was very interesting to me, in light of so many depictions of them as simply cold, calculating "evil geniuses."

And it's interesting to think about how, if you were thrown into that society in the capacity of a diplomat, you would interact with these people as individuals.